An Inheritance of Ashes (27 page)

I turned a circle, disoriented, in the sweet, humid air. Home shimmered behind me, a half dozen or a thousand steps away. Its warm lights and familiar corners felt farther away than the stars.

“Thom?” I called, and coughed lightly, then harder. Tyler and Heron had called it the sign of Twisted Things coming—that thin air that made it hard to hear, hard to breathe. It was more: it was the air of another world, a world where it was warm, and quiet, and always raining. Where exhausted soldiers might have found, for a few moments on the battlefield, some peace.

Nothing stirred in the grass or in the forest that stretched out before me, patched and thriving, its blooms wafting sour and sweet. “Thom?” I called again, and a lizard scuttled, terrified, away. I was alone in the Wicked God's strange paradise: entirely alone.

I pushed forward, the knife heavy in my hand, searching for flattened grass or footprints. The wind retreated. Nothing felt real anymore except the ground springing beneath my feet and the silence that muffled my hurrying steps.

I'd thought I understood aloneness, tending a farm that didn't speak to its neighbors with a sister who didn't, sometimes, speak at all. But wherever this was, this untouched land, it was the loneliest place in the world. Here I could understand how Heron had lost John Balsam for good. Here I could face what it meant to feel my world crumbling:
I am losing Halfrida Hoffmann.

I was so damned far from who I wanted to be: someone who wasn't aching with anger all the time. Who smiled, who looked at her neighbors with trust and not fear. Someone who loved her sister and knew how to do right. Nothing I'd done, said,
been
since Thom left home had truly felt like me. Except kissing Tyler Blakely and taking on a hired man because he had reminded me what it was to be kind.

I stumbled on the hummocked green, on the infinitesimal and unbridgeable ground between me and the clean sheets of home. I owed Heron, I realized, more than I could repay. He'd reached across all the polite distance I kept between myself and other people: the ones I loved, the ones I hated. He had called me kind. I owed Tyler and Nat, who had insisted that I open my closed bedroom door, who had lifted me up, who had
stayed.
In our desperation, we'd offered each other comfort, sheltered each other. Everyone in my universe was farther away than the stars tonight, but Heron and me, and Nat, and Tyler: we held fast like a constellation. We made each other less alone.

I had to stop lying to myself. I had to stop it for good. Because if I was brave—if I was honest, when I stepped out of this silent world onto the shores of the river I was born next to, into whatever destruction I'd just created—I wouldn't have to be alone at all.

I blew out the last of my dead air and said, “Keep on walking.” Heron had cut the belly from a storm, alone. And I wasn't alone.

“Thom?” I called again, and stepped into the soft forest shade.

Long green leaves bent in streamers to touch the loamy carpet of veined white flowers. A spinner bird flitted from branch to branch, brown-winged, its talons crafting a web to trap crickets. The air drew a loving finger across my cheek, brought the scent of dampened earth. Through the branches I saw clouds forming for another round of quiet rain.

And through it, improbably, I caught a whiff of home fires.

“Thom!” I called, and followed the smell of cooking, of safety, of community, through the rain-whipped trees.

The source of the smoke was less a cave than a hummock, hollowed out painstakingly by stones and blistered hands. The low sound of human voices wisped out of it on the smoke: the most welcome thing I'd heard in hours or years. I peered into that crevice, ready for ghosts, men, gods—and a human face, battered and burnt, short hair matted with illness and road dust and pain, peered back.

“Hallie?” Thom Clarlund said.

“Thom,” I whispered, and flung myself toward his scratched-up arms.

He backed up fast; far, far away from me. His seared face stretched into terrible lines. “This is another nightmare. This isn't real.”

“It is,” I insisted. “I came to get you. I'm here.”

From behind him, another voice—a thick, deep, musical voice—said, “Are you talking to yourself again?”

The man at the campfire looked like the specter of death: a dark hat, tattered sleeves, a bloody bandage twined around his left knee. His boots were drying by the fire, or what was left of his boots: a pair of rot-soaked, beaten leather rags, reeking of mold and dirt. His grayed eyebrows rose to his hairline. “Who in God's name are
you?
”

“Hallie?” a voice called—howled—against the trees, and I whipped around. “Hallie, goddammit, where are you?”

“Heron!” I answered. Heron was here. Heron had walked through the worlds for me.

“Thom,” I said urgently. I grabbed his hand, and he winced. “We've got to go. Marthe's waiting. There's soldiers coming—we've got
no time.
”

Thom's hand spasmed on mine. His face was as gray as a burial cairn. “You're real.”

I blinked away sweat, blood, hot tears, and nodded.

“Hallie,” he said, dead urgent. “Go.”

“I can't leave you behind,” I said.

“We'll be right behind you,” he said, and put both hands on my cheeks.
“Go.”

I crashed, desperate, back through the alien trees, John Balsam's knife frozen to my hand. Branches whipped at my face and I ducked them, listening, listening for the sound of Thomas Clarlund behind me, coming home.

I broke into the clearing where the hole sprawled between the worlds, and Heron—pacing, coughing helplessly—looked up.

“Hallie, dammit,” he said around a gasp—one that had nothing to do with the thin air floating about us. “Do you
know
where you are?”

“I've found Thom,” I said joyously, tears starting in my eyes. “Heron, I did it. He's coming. He's safe.”

“You absolute madwoman,” he said, taking both my arms, and propelled me through the rent between worlds.

Sound snapped back into my ears. Sound
exploded.

The riverbank I'd left was obliterated. Stones flew and rattled through tornado-force winds; the screams of Twisted Things rose shrieking against the winter chill; and everywhere, everywhere, I smelled burning.

Heron dove after me onto the shattered shore, materializing in pieces against that forest sun: a blistered hand, a leg flailing for solid ground, shirttails flapping in the breeze. And after him, through the rain of feathers and lightning, came Thom, bent down against the bloody purple light.

“I have to go back,” he croaked, and collapsed on the sand. “There's another man in there.”

“Where?” Heron asked, behind me, through the storm, and Thom's jaw dropped.

“You,”
he said. “Godslayer. You're the one with the knife.”

“Yes,” Heron snapped. “Where
is
he?”

Thom pointed. And Heron sprang into the stormwinds, through the rain of Twisted Things, into another world.

I dropped John Balsam's knife on the windblown, root-split stones. Wormed my arms under Thom's shoulders and dragged him desperately away from the hole. He shook me off weakly. “Wait.”

“We
can't
—”

“Have to,” he insisted, and then Heron emerged from the awful tear in the sky with a black-clad body, limp over his shoulder.

Thom stumbled to his feet. I took his hand: a twinned mess of scrapes and blisters and burns. We stumbled through the death-lit night, through the destruction, with all hell at our heels.

The orchard trees smoked under the rain of Twisted Things; we cleared their shadows just as the first flame licked free. We limped past the pens, rounded the corner to the house. “Marthe!” I shouted as we climbed the rise to the kitchen porch. “Marthe, it's Thom,
please!
”

She opened the kitchen door as the flames bloomed in our cherry trees, wild-haired, eyes full of reflected lightning. “What—” Marthe said, and stopped cold. Her arms unfolded from her chest and reached longingly. “Thomas?”

Thomas Clarlund staggered up the steps he'd left so many months ago, into my sister's arms.

“We found him,” I gasped as I sagged onto the porch. A last bit of vanity. Before I put it away, became myself. Stopped telling stories that weren't true. “We did it. We brought him home.”

Through the dirt, through the rough fabric of Marthe's nightdress, his voice choked out, “Baby, baby—”

She squeezed out a sob, her hands trembling, and then looked past me to Heron behind me and to the man he'd laid out like a carcass on the porch. “Hallie,” she said, “who is that?”

Heron looked up—his mild eyes twisted with rage. “Yes, tell us who it is, Thomas.”

“Heron—” I objected.

Thom wiped his eyes, his bleary, sick eyes, and said, “That's Asphodel Jones.”

Behind me, rainbowing through the night, the smoke and screams and ash reached upward, and Roadstead Farm began to burn.

“HEAVE!” HERON CALLED, AND WATER BUCKETED OVER THE
burning trees.

Small green lizards, flushed by the smoke, squeaked and fled the orchard, and Joy and Sadie darted quick-limbed through the shadows and herded them into our knives. It was already a losing battle: thin tangles of web shone between our fence posts, growing thicker with every passing minute, and they were nothing to the monstrosities that stretched into the sky. Beyond the fields, Tyler's nightmare tree shambled across the lane on fat roots, the points of its knotted horns bobbing dark against the moon.

There were gods in the lakelands now, for real. There were monsters, and I had let them in.

In my head, everything was still silent and calm.
Bucket in the well, water to the upstairs basin,
I recited with a coolness I had never felt before.
Don't give up. Keep walking.

I'd run out of fear. I'd run out of fury. They would spit on my name from Windstown all the way to the old battlefields, but I'd made my choice there, on that shattered riverbank. My brother was finally back from the war.

Now I just had to live with the consequences.

I hauled clean water up the stairs to Marthe's room, bucket after bucket, while the world burned.

Marthe perched on the edge of her bed, wiping dirt and blood from Thom's blistered face. She was crying silently, distractedly as he emerged: skull-thin, the twist of his mouth bitter, his dark brown skin ashy with illness. His good shirt hung loose on him, torn to shreds, half the buttons just stumps of brown thread. The rest glowed, scratched and dust-stained: a veteran's polished pearl. I recognized him less and less with every bucket of dirty water I emptied off the porch.

“What day is it?” he croaked, and shrugged off Marthe's dabbing cloth.

“It's the third of December,” Marthe said. “Winter's come in.”

There was no sound in the room but his distorted breathing. “Did I make it in time?”

A curious look came over Marthe's face, and she shuddered down to her toes. “Just in time,” she said, like an afterthought. “Just.”

Thom drew a harsh breath, let it out, and sank relieved into the nest of rucked-up sheets. I put down the bucket, mouth open. “Marthe—”

“I'm pregnant, not dead,” she said, fainter now. “The contractions aren't even regular yet.”

She pressed a hand to her dress, her wet-stained dress, and I finally realized it wasn't from spilled well water. There was fluid seeping through it onto the rug, down her calves. The baby was coming. The baby was
here
.

“Marthe—” I whispered, and ran down the hall to Papa's old room.

We hadn't used it since his passing—just closed the door and left it closed, as if we might board his ghost away. The room was a swim of fabric: moth-eaten dust sheets and a pile of bandages heaped high on the chestnut rocker Mama had nursed us in. Between them lay the Wicked God's prophet, half stripped and unconscious, on the ruins of my parents' bed.

James and Cal Blakely stood in the far corner, clinging tight to each other's hands. Mrs. Blakely paced past them, up and down the length of the bed. No one had cleaned Asphodel Jones's wounds. He seeped under the scrutiny of three shaken, fear-lined faces.

“Marthe's water broke,” I whispered. Afraid to speak lest that man wake up.

Round, homey Eglantine Blakely's eyebrows shot up. “She's early.”

I wrapped both arms around my rib cage. I didn't know what to say.

Mrs. Blakely took a deep breath and smoothed her dress. “All right. We'll do this in the washroom. I need boiled water, a cushion, and all the clean towels you have.”

“Ma'am,” I said automatically.

She strode to the dusty threshold, and hesitated. “Listen here, the both of you,” she said. “Don't you do the fool thing you're thinking once my back is turned.”

“Eglantine—” James said, agonized.

“Don't make yourself a murderer, Jim Blakely. Not for
him
.” James flushed, and his sister-in-law disappeared down the hallway and rapped hard on Marthe's door.

James and Callum looked at each other, and their fingers twined tight. “We need to set a guard,” James said low. “He'll wake up. We have to know what to
do
when he does.”

A Twisted Thing clattered against the window and smeared down the pane. Callum, his eyes dark-circled, pulled shut the blinds.

“Jim, I can't do this,” he said simply.

James put his head in his hands. “I know.”

The Wicked God's prophet bled onto Papa's sheets, and I fled.

Nat shoved through the door, wild-haired and soot-marked, just as I put the kettle on the stove. She took water straight from the dipper and drank it down, down, down.